Analysis: StumbleUpon’s Top 50 Stumblers

Good work friend. You must have really worked hard to find this. I always used to wonder what the Stumblers use to give more thumbs up. So they rate pages more, then photos and at last video. Good. Wish you good luck to be one in top 50 stumblers list.

Hi Glenn,

Great work. Could you add fan numbers stat?

Glen, amazing post, really nice !! I love SU

Great info! The really interesting thing would be how much more traffic a vote from a top stumbler sends compared to a small time stumbler.

Any chance you could give more info on how the two month stumble made it into the top ranks?
(btw, you have two “subscribe to comment” checkboxes above and below the comment box)

Excellent post and gives a bit of incite into the top stumblers. If one you only “liked” 500 pages, how is he in the top 50?

I personally dislike SU traffic since they are rarely very targeted and don’t convert.

Also, you should do the median instead of mean when you have such a large range.

haha you always put a lot of effort into your posts. You deserve my thumbs up keep up the good work Glen!!!

a very good resource, I thoroughly enjoyed it

I agree with you. I don’t think there is anything like this ot there.

There is now! Good work.

I am glad I ’stumbled’ upon this post…..awesome job Glenn!

You’re Spinning bro!

Excellent write up. Thanks for sharing this SU information :).

I’m also surprised by the average age of Stumble Upon users. I would have assumed low to high twenties as the overwhelming majority. I’ve been proven wrong!

Agreeed

Well this is a bit odd, I came to this post earlier from Pronet and now I just found you on stumbleupon.

Great list!

Glen, this is really good stuff. I cannot wait to read your interview with the top 3 stumbler to see how he made it so quickly

David

Great post Glenn. I thought I was doing ok as a Stumbler, but next to these guys I am nothing.

stumbled your post, interesting read. I never thumb videos and have my prefs set not to show them, which does not work very well.
My reason for this- slow connection speed and a 1gb monthly download limit

Good info. My theory about the photographs is that there is a large number of them out there, and while they held some interest in my early SU period, I have become really critical. If they are not outstanding, I ignore them. Same with videos, I think.

Glen, well done on another great post. I always like this data mining stuff myself !

*stumbled*

Nice calculations and work on the post.

But I don’t really see the advantage of being an Top StumbleUpon user actually. What the use of having 130,434 pages liked?

Great Job my friend!, I will stumble your page!, visit my site, maybe you find something useful, you are invited!

Great job Glen !! Very interesting !

Regarding the female vs male gender on stumble!

I believe, as a woman, we have less time to play around then men!!!!!!
What say you women???
B

A way to become a top stumbler is to repeatedly stumble sites that are always going to getlots of positive votes - say being the first to Stumble each new XKCD cartoon the moment it comes out, and if it’s already been stumbled on it’s main page, stumble it from the category or even image URL, just so you can be the discoverer.

Obviously that’s not the point of Stumble to repeatedly ‘discover’ the same site over & over again, but as each ‘discovery’ will garner hundreds if not thousands of thumbs up, your profile will rise accordingly.

Glen, Thank you so much for doing these charts. I have thought for several months that I had reviewed more sites than anyone else in the world. Turns out I was right. I have 133,530 sites flagged, and am stumbling every spare minute. I want to thank everyone for their help and reviews.

Thanx, Ben

Thanx for the information, it was very helpful indeed!!!

I do think that being on the Top Stumblers list has added benefits, especially if you’ve a website/blog. I think having more friends/fans does matter. When I started out on SU, I could hardly influence any traffic to anywhere. However, now I have about 19 mutual fans/friends. Once I just SUed my Tagged (a social networking site) page and within 2 days it showed about 50 extra pageviews. Of course since no one voted up, it didn’t continue, but still I think the more fans you have and the more sites you have rated affects how you can influence the influx of traffic to a particular website.

Good job on the post buddy. StumbleUpon is my favorite. Great crowd who actually read your article. I’d imagine that most of the top stumblers get tons of requests to stumble other sites. Congrats on getting mentioned by Darren too.

Good report.

I liked the beginning but then you started using bar graphs with only one set of numbers, so the age one looks like most stumblers are 80 years old. If you are going to include graphs give them purpose, graphing a single set of numbers is pointless.

I found your analysis useful in better understanding Stumble Upon. I am also surprised at the average age of top stumblers and the speed at which some of them achieve that status.

nice work i dont no why you would have gone into all that research but interesting it was.

great analysis - it was nice to hear the remarks of one of the top su users so we could find out what it takes to become one.

very good and very resourceful…

Very nice charts. Thank you for putting all the effort into it. I have to wonder though, what are the full requirements to become a top stumbler? I’ve been on SU for over a year, have stumbled over 12000 sites and over 300 fans, but have yet to have my name on that top 50… and yes, it’s just a status thing, but I’m totally into the status stuff : )

Guess I’ll keep stumbling and stumbling some more… some day I’ll make that page
Thanks again Mr. Allsopp!

Nice charts and all but I think your age chart might be a little flawed I’m a high school student but I know plenty middle schoolers and teens at my high school aged 12-15 that use stumble upon religiously as i once did when i was 15. I think all they do is lie about their age though.

Wow, a lot of good information, and alot of hard work… Thanks for doing the grunt work. I love using StumbleUpon, but I won’t be making the top list as most sites I thumbs up had alreayd been hit, lol.

But over all, great info and kind of interesting that the demographic is what it is. I get a good bit of traffic to my site, but I haven’t really written about it.

Hey!!
I’m 15 and ive been a stumbler since 14 so why is the youngest 16!!!!! uther den dat great work im not going to check if its rite so ill just take ur word fo it.

Nice work. I’ve been in the top stumblers for a while now, although because life (outside the internet) is getting hectic at the moment, i seem to be slipping down the ranks, was 26 the other week, now around 41.

Thanks for providing the stats. We’ll keep stumbling the raw data

i have been stumble since long but not getting traffic. Can anyone guide . my website is http://vedic.x3fusion.com/forum

I believe currently about 20% of my traffic is from Stumble upon random posts. What I find interesting is when a post that had gotten a surge of visitors from StumbleUpon months before, starts getting another surge later. Which made me wonder if they time out URLs and new people suggest them or if they recycle them after so much time.

Oh well, I enjoy using Stumble upon when I’m wanting to mix it up and didn’t feel like going through all my Reader feeds.

This was very interesting. I’m a new Stumbler. I like it a lot though. I’m sure I’ll be seeing more of you.

Interesting article and a great deal of work has gone into it. Well written too. This gets a thumbs up from me.

Excellent information… thanks for wading through the data.

Taking an average of the a range from 16 to 80 yields misleading results. First, I believe (I’m not sure) that the 80 y/o falls outside the bell curve for the rest of your sample and needs to be discarded as an anomaly. But who wants to deal with standard deviations and the such? 34 is not an accurate assessment on the sample population. Try the mean age of 25.

I just clicked the “Top 50 Stumblers” page. I’ve been here just a hair over two years now. I clicked an unfamiliar face on the page. Stats for this 24-year-old woman from Ontario:
Likes 1,935 pages, 12 videos, 206 photos
• 255 fans • Received 28 reviews | Member since Nov 29, 2006
This is a supposedly “Top Stumbler” according to the 50 Top Stumblers page as of this comment. How much influence does this person REALLY have? She likes fewer than 2000 pages and has 255 fans and has been on SU for ONE YEAR.

I’ve been here TWO YEARS, here are my stats:
Likes 15,492 pages, 127 videos, 517 photos
• 4,483 fans • Received 1,073 reviews | Member since Nov 10, 2005
I have already had over 150,000 SU visitors alone (my stats counter shows twice that many if one includes non-SU member views) and am averaging now between 500-1000 visitors/day.
Yet not once in my two years here have I ever been named a “Top Stumbler.” But you can bet when I review something, plenty of people see it.

But if you look at our respective stats, how is it that the woman I listed at the top is shown as a “Top 50 Stumbler” (and supposedly her “thumbs” carry more weight) — and I’m not? In only twice the amount of time here, I’ve thumbed 13,000 more pages (7 times more) than she has, I have 4200 more fans and I have garnered over 1000 more reviews.

So, I disagree with the “criteria” of what makes someone a “Top Stumbler.”

I stumble frequently, but I also spend time, like Lerryn mentioned in an earlier comment, doing other things (whereas she spends a lot of time helping new members in forums, which I consider to be a highly valuable service to SU and to the influx of new members who are learning their way around, I spend time making sure my blog has content people want to see and I choose my “thumbs” and reviews based on my own personal preferences). Simply clicking the “I like it” button over and over does not necessarily generate much of anything except throwing a lot of pages into rotation. It’s a combination of several things, including the weight and influence one has as well as other factors that make someone a “Top Stumbler,” in my opinion (such as Anita stated in one of her comments, as well, as she has a large fan base so her thumbs and reviews carry much more weight, in my opinion, than some newbie who has few fans to even see their reviews).

Also, the “I like it” button, unlike what the author of this article states at the beginning (to click what you think OTHERS will like), is SUPPOSED to be used as a PERSONALIZED stumbling tool geared to send you, the user, pages that YOU like. That’s what it’s here for! (It’s even called: “I LIKE IT” — not “I THINK EVERYONE ELSE WILL LIKE IT.”) It’s supposed to be tailored to suit you and your preferences. So by clicking “I like it” just because you think it’s going to make you popular with others in the system kind of seems to defeat the purpose to me. I click what I like, and I pass over what I don’t (and occasionally I thumb down stuff that really ticks me off).

Both Lerryn and I are in or close to the Top Ten in fans and review numbers, yet as she states, she’s never been a Top Stumbler either. If you go to Stumblerank.com, you will find you can arrange what are considered the Top 100 Stumblers based on several different criteria — but all on listed based on HARD NUMBERS, not just some vague criteria that seems to be a bit flawed such as the puzzling SU’s offical Top Stumblers page. Granted, Stumblerank.com is not an official SU site, it’s just for informational purposes. However, I feel it is far more accurate and less arbitrary than SU’s “official version” appears to be — and has no motive of any kind to be biased in any manner whatsoever. Again, I am often left scratching my head at how some of the stumblers listed on SU’s Top Stumblers page ever got there.

By the way, since it seemed to be asked by a number of commenters: a lot of stumblers, prior to eBay’s takeover, did not want to publicize their exact ages for reasons of privacy on their pages. However, if you did not list an age at all, you were unable to view R- or X-rated content. So, many of us listed our ages as 80 and 90 as *obvious* misrepresentations because SU gave us no choice until eBay bought it. Now we have a choice whether or not to show our ages, and many of us (including myself) choose to show no age at all. But this is why there are so many “80-year-olds” around: most likely they are still using the older (classic) version of SU that doesn’t allow you to hide your age like the new (BETA) version does.

Please note that these are just my thoughts and are in no way meant as a personal affront toward anyone here or at SU. I have no gripes against Stumblers, but I’m just getting tired of personal agendas and all the sudden “dissection” of stumblers and their habits. I feel like everything is being monitored, analyzed, scrutinized and marketed to death. It’s making SU start to feel overly commercialized and creepy, and it’s not at all what I signed up for when I started two years ago.

I realize I’m not making any “friends” among the sudden influx of “SU marketers/exploiters” by speaking so bluntly about my thoughts. But then again, I’m not here to make other people money and make a ton of “friends” who only want something from me most of the time anymore. I’m at SU because I wanted what it initially offered and what is rapidly being eroded away — a personal web browsing experience. And I may very well leave SU due to the fact that none of us are any longer simply “SU users for our own enjoyment” — we’re now reduced to statistics and numbers and “traffic vehicles.”

Sincerely,
Caile-girl

This got a thumbs up . Thanks for crunching through the numbers and getting the stats.

I like this review. I wonder if all of the woman in your chart r really women, or they just don’t want guys to hit on them or something like that.

Simply excellent, my thumbs up vote for you (Y)

I’m with caile-girl on this. Isn’t StumbleUpon supposed to be a unique browsing experience which you can share !

The article is well written but I have a horror of being reduced to mere statistics and charts!

wow nice info. I still wonder how to be top stumbler with 501 stumbles

Is there any update for this year? thanks